[slt2021]

the full quote from Steinbeck's article "A Primer on the '30s." Esquire (June 1960), p. 85-93 tells more about socialists/communists, than it tells about capitalists class:

"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.

"I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew — at least they claimed to be Communists — couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves."

[nocoolnametom]

Cool, it's a false attribution or at the very least a very mangled quote. The fact that the popular version of the quote has staying power isn't because of the authorship, it's because people recognize the truth in what the popular version of the quote is saying. It's kind of like the false attribution of "America is great because America is good. If America ever stops being good, it will stop being great," to Tocqueville. The quote continues to be shared not because most of those sharing it give two cents about Tocqueville, they share it because it speaks to them (well, that and in the case of the "good/great" quote you can fill in the blank for what "good" and "great" mean with whatever you want).